Tag Archives: sorority

I grew up taking baths. My mother said that was what “we” did. I don’t know what that means except it conveyed the idea that soaking in gallons of water was the only way to become truly clean and that those who showered were covered with scum and unclean. Oh, I took showers at camp. In my college dorm, I took showers because I don’t remember there being tubs. I went to college shortly after the movie Psycho was released so taking a shower was an act of courage. In the sorority house, we had two tubs, located in the same small room–a literal “bath room”. Cozy and a little creepy so most of us took showers.

I didn’t really become a shower fan until I had to get up at five-fifteen to get to work on time. I’d always taken a bath at night and washed my hair in the sink in the morning, a great waste of time when one has to leave the house at six-thirty.

It wasn’t until many years late after watching an episode of Friends that I discovered I really didn’t know exactly how one took a shower. I mean, there are no classes in it, no pamplets or information booklets. Yesterday, I googled how to take a shower and found pages of information with instructional sketches and pictures and explanations of how one takes a shower. Amazing.

I asked the question in the title of this blog NOT to elicite stories of unbounded lust. No, I asked that because as I read those blog pages, I discovered that it’s a good idea to brush your teeth in the shower. This cuts down on having toothpaste down the front of your nightie. My question: Do you brush your teeth in the shower? If so, how did you know learn about this? I’m feeling a little ignorant on this point.

I’ve just started reading the Jack Reacher books. In the first book, this man travels for a day, walks fourteen miles, is arrested and spends the weekend in jail. Four days without a shower or change of clothing and women still fall all over him. He did, however, take showers in the third book and describes his three shower techniques in detail. The shortest takes eleven minutes, a basic shower plus hair wash. I can’t image spending eleven minutes in the shower. What does one do? Wait, I don’t want to know. The second type of shower adds a shave and takes twenty minutes. The third is an eleven-minute shower. Then, he gets out of the shower with moisterized skin and shaves, then finishes the shower and washes his hair again. A total of over thirty minutes. With Reacher, it’s all or nothing. For me, a waste of the morning.